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With respect to the 2016 budget; I’m not particularly disturbed because it's still just a proposal.

Government is a continuum and I'm certain those who put together the 2016 bill must have leveraged on the previous budget and input from every government agency and establishment in order to have something presented in December 2015.

These agencies, parastatals and ministries must have begun drafting their budgets based on the expectation that Fortunato would continue as president and then the subsequent shakeup when that didn't work out could have caused delays. There is an uncompleted four storey building where I work that was begun in 2010; it is still far from completion despite the great importance ascribed to the project when it was first initiated.

This project still gets listed in the budget every year despite the fact that the former administrator has already placed a commissioning plaque on its wall bearing his name; he did this just a few weeks to the end of his tenure a little over a year ago but the project remains at practically the same stage it was about 3 years ago. If this has happened in one establishment, one then can only imagine what other absurdities exist throughout the entire budget.

There's only so much President Buhari could have done to proofread the budget proposal before presentation; the document is out in the public domain and before the House of Assembly to do the needful and sieve out the repetitions and outright scams.  Hue and cry that Buhari wants to defraud Nigerians make absolutely no sense.  If he was interested in doing that, should he not have treated the budget with secrecy like his predecessor did at a time so that it would get hurriedly read and passed by the assembly?

It should be simple; the health facility at Aso rock has a budget which dwarfs all other health facilities across the nation meant to serve other Nigerians. What should the assembly do about this? They should determine if it makes sense or not; it obviously doesn't so they should excise it from the final document.  What our dear legislators are capable of doing is to use such as a tool to blackmail the executive to concede to their own excesses instead of working for the common good.

Many modern day Nigerians aren't particularly good readers; the majority cannot be said to have a reading culture and may have trouble comprehending whenever they take time out to read. The alarm over the budget has helped to improve many Nigerians who now read and pay greater attention to detail. The members in support of the past administration have also found detecting irregularities within the budget very easy. It may appear like a monumental embarrassment to the current administration but I chose to disagree.  It will only become a full scale embarrassment if the budget emerges from the assembly without greatly losing weight and if the next budget after this still contains astronomical allocations for kitchen utensils, softwares, furniture and the civil service.

The many beneficiaries of government jobs due to "man know man" from the last administration cannot all just be laid off overnight in order to trim the civil service; it will require some time and patience before the many scam networks entrenched within the government's structure are all exposed and excised.  Time and patience are two things Nigerians must value this time around. I don't claim to know how the country's budget is put together, what I know is that the president cannot veto it however perfect or imperfect it is. The scrutiny which that document is undergoing presently can only be beneficial to Nigerians eventually.  In the interim, let us continue to shine the light to expose the scams and put pressure on the assembly to do jobs they get mysterious and bloated allowances for. 


PS:
Two portions of this article have been edited to reflect a retraction of wrong information which suggested that President Jonathan presented his budgets late. The error was not intended to mislead the reader and I sincerely apologise for the error.